Article October 17, 1914 Issue

"The night shineth"

EVA S. W. WILLIAMS

We have most of us played, as children, the game called blindman's buff, in which one player is blindfolded and hunts for the others. The room may be brilliantly lighted, but with his own will and consent a bandage has been placed over his eyes so that he can see nothing, and it might as well be all darkness that surrounds him. He knows, however, that at any moment he can remove the bandage, or ask another to remove it for him, and he will see as well as ever.

Now, the simile may seem to be far-fetched, but it is not really going too far to compare our experience as mortals with that of the blindman of the game. At this period, the beginning of the twentieth century, when Mrs. Eddy's discovery of Christian Science is nearly fifty years old, we have no longer the excuse that our ancestors had for ignorance of what man is and of his relation to God. We may by no means grasp the meaning of all we read in the textbook of Christian Science, but from the outset it is possible and indeed imperative for us to know that because its author proved so much, we may trust with unquestioning security in the accuracy of its statements. What we have to do is to make the truths of Science our own by putting one after another into practice, until in the fulness of time we shall understand all.

One far-reaching statement of Science declares that God is "all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal" (Science and Health, p. 587), and this enforces the acceptance of these words of the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm: "If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee." What, in the first place, is meant by darkness? Surely every illusion of sin, pain, sorrow, sickness; and it is these conditions which in God's sight have no place. He does not see them. It would be a great help in the darkest hours of human experience to cling so firmly to this that the night may be seen to shine as the day.

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"The night shineth"

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